Maintaining a Chinese Nationalism: Patriotic Education, Second-hand Rose and the Politics of ‘National Conditions’

By Jonathan Doughty

Abstract

This article considers the development of China’s system of ‘patriotic education’ (aiguozhuyi jiaoyu). It examines Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents on patriotic education’s establishment, along with high-school (gaozhong) texts used as ‘national conditions’ (guoqing) curricula, in order to demonstrate how subsequent considerations of the development of Chinese nationalist identity must consider various modes of the party-state’s educational apparatus in the ‘teaching’ of nationalism. We may then view from a better vantage how the Chinese party-state maintains discursive hegemony over the Chinese cultural past – inherited, imagined or otherwise – in its ideological seizure of nationalism, and how this ‘official’ nationalism interacts with and engages other nationalisms of the Chinese nation, such as that found within the vibrant Chinese subculture of yaogun yue (rock and roll).

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